Palomar Skies a blog with news and information about the Palomar Observatory. Postings here will cover current research, history and public outreach events taking place at the observatory.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Astrophoto Friday: the First Brown Dwarf

A brown dwarf is an object that is more massive than a planet like Jupiter, but not massive enough to undergo sustained nuclear fusion like a star. For many years they existed only in theory, as they had not been found in nature.

All of that changed in 1994 when a team of astronomers using Palomar's 60-inch telescope (armed with an early form of adaptive optics) captured the first image of one:

The big blob in the image is a dwarf star known as Gliese 229. The smaller blob to the right is Gliese 229B, the first brown dwarf discovered. The discovery was confirmed just over a year later by the Hubble Space Telescope.